The MBA is dead … long live the MBA!

"Have you ever noticed," muses Henley Africa dean Jon Foster-Pedley, "how most people with a degree say they have a bachelor’s or an honours or a master’s or a PhD — but that when it comes to the MBA, they say, ‘I am an MBA’?"

Despite countless pronouncements over the years that the MBA is dead, the degree remains a source of pride for millions of graduates around the world, and the ultimate academic goal for millions of others.

Record numbers of South Africans applied for MBA places in 2021, and though most were not accepted, the numbers bear testament to the allure of the master of business administration degree and its twin, the master of business leadership, offered in SA by the Unisa Graduate School of Business Leadership.

This is despite many outsiders declaring that Covid, by forcing most programmes online and causing business schools to suspend or abandon many established MBA activities, would be the final nail in the degree’s coffin.

All the pandemic has done is accelerate an online transition that was already in progress. It is only by adjusting continuously to meet changing demands that the degree, created in 1908 by Harvard Business School, has survived. The University of Pretoria was the first institution outside North America to offer an MBA, from 1949.

Sipho Mokoena, acting director of the University of Limpopo’s Turfloop Graduate School of Leadership, says schools that try to resist the online and digital flow "might become extinct".

"Covid is a lesson to jettison so-called tradition," he says.

Shahiem Patel, MBA head at Durban-based Regent Business School, believes the MBA "has changed irrevocably, and will continue to do so. The fact that it is changing is proof that it is not dead."

In SA, that change is happening in many ways. What was once a degree primarily for white men is now a better reflection of the SA population. Of 6,536 MBA students at participating schools in 2021, nearly two-thirds are black and 45% are women.

Schools have also transformed. Full-time teaching faculty are now split almost equally among races and genders.

Even before Covid, distance education, requiring little or no personal classroom tuition, was taking over from traditional part-and full-time programmes. As discussed elsewhere in this cover story, it can be argued that the loss of close-quarters, opinionated sparring between students and academics removes one of the core pillars of MBA education. Shouting at a computer screen isn’t quite the same.

Then again, the purpose of classroom interaction — whether real or virtual — has been changing for some time. With so much information available online, many schools now expect students to turn up already armed with the facts, ready to debate them.

Gordon Institute of Business Science (Gibs) interim dean Morris Mthombeni says: "We’ve said for a long time that the classroom is not for teaching."

As far as Regenesys Business School dean Penny Law is concerned, there will be a greater emphasis on a "flipped" classroom experience, "where the focus … will be on dialogue, dynamic interaction and application, rather than inputs".

Programme content will also continue to evolve. MBA graduates, asked where programmes need to place more teaching emphasis, put digital transformation top of the list.

Unisa’s Andile Nobatyi says the subject should be woven throughout the programme. "The activity needs to be integrated within the curriculum design rather than as a standalone concept, lest we have graduates who cannot integrate such competencies within a business."

Subject integration doesn’t always have an obvious impact. Some years ago, business schools integrated the study of ethics through their programmes.

In fact, says Milpark Business School dean Cobus Oosthuizen, it still needs to become properly embedded in the MBA framework, along with other issues of our time, such as sustainability and corporate social investment. "Hard-hearted management orthodoxy is no longer the driving force of an MBA," he says.

Despite graduates saying MBAs have improved their ethical understanding, it appears to have had less effect on their actions. Employers say they are unimpressed with the ethical behaviour of managers and executives returning from MBA studies.

Nelson Mandela University Business School’s Sam February is not surprised. "We talk ethics and behaviour from a theoretical perspective, but do we actually incorporate this into learning?" he asks. "We have to be less academic and more practical."

He adds: "I want to change the behaviour of the students, but their character comes from within."

Wits Business School MBA head Thabang Mokoaleli-Mokoteli agrees. "You can’t teach people how to behave. You can give them the tools, but it’s their choice how they use them. What they do depends on their character and personal preference," she says.

Rhodes Business School "promotes ethical organisation and invites lecturers who are people of integrity", says director Owen Skae. "But that doesn’t necessarily lead to a change of behaviour."

Yet when Rhodes briefly considered reducing ethical content in the programme, "students rebelled".

Kobus Jonker, director of the Tshwane School for Business & Society, believes it’s unfair to pin the "unethical" tag on MBA graduates alone. "It’s a national problem, at all levels of government and society, so you can’t expect one group to be immune," he says. "As business schools, we do our best to encourage ethical conduct, but there might be an argument for revisiting the way we do it."

Nowhere is this moral dichotomy more apparent than in the relationship with technology. Cheating in exams and dissertations is easier in an online environment, where there are no supervisors looking over your shoulder while you write. Whether it’s plagiarism, by downloading material from the internet, or paying professional "shadow writers" to prepare papers for you, old-fashioned oversight no longer works.

Jako Volschenk, MBA programme head at the University of Stellenbosch Business School, puts the incidence of cheating at "probably less than 5%", but it’s serious enough that some schools employ specialist proctoring companies to monitor students online. Linked to students’ computers, they are able to monitor the provenance of written work and even compare the writing style to a student’s regular submissions.

Skae admits to feeling uncomfortable with the potential level of surveillance. "There’s something Orwellian about it," he says.

There’s also disparity between how graduates rate their people skills, and how others view them. A frustrated HR manager talks of a "prevalent know-it-all attitude".

Whatever their misgivings, employers still think enough of MBAs to pay them more and promote them faster than colleagues. So maybe a sense of one-upmanship is to be expected.

Wits Business School director Maurice Radebe isn’t far off the mark when he repeats the old joke: "How do you know if someone has an MBA? They tell you."

Law says diplomatically: "There is a perception that MBA graduates are arrogant and might inadvertently contribute to creating conflict in an organisation when they share their knowledge."

Employers can minimise this friction by having a plan to absorb graduates and their new knowledge into the organisation. What’s the point of encouraging them to study if you don’t know how to make use of what they learn?

Management College of Southern Africa programme managers Martin Motene and Kairoon Nisa Fyzoo say companies must ensure that this knowledge is absorbed painlessly and "matched with corporate rules and culture".

Amid all these new pressures, business schools are updating their MBA programmes to remain in tune with what business and society require. North-West University Business School director Jan van Romburgh says the school is creating a curriculum panel, drawn from industry, to shape its MBA.

"The environment is changing so fast that we need industry to tell us if we are teaching the right things," he says. The school is also belatedly implementing a structured branding and marketing campaign, having never made proper use of its status as one of the first schools in SA to win international accreditation for its MBA.

Admittedly, not being in a major metropolitan centre will limit growth, but the school could take a brand-building tip or two from Gibs, part of the University of Pretoria. Despite being one of SA’s youngest business schools, founded in 2000, it has built a formidable reputation. Once again this year, its MBA rates top among employers in our market research, and is the most sought-after among students.

At the University of the Free State Business School — where a new director, Udesh Pillay, will take over on October 1 after the recent retirement of long-serving Helena van Zyl — acting director Liezel Massyn says the school is in "the final stages" of an MBA curriculum review.

Catherine Duggan, director of the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business, says she and new MBA head Mignon Reyneke have begun a "refreshing" of the degree. "We want it to be applicable but also global in ways that weren’t always possible when people weren’t familiar with digital engagements."

These will include the opportunity for students to engage regularly with "people, companies and governments" overseas. "Digital technology provides us with an exciting opportunity to broaden students’ experience and engagement in ways that could not be done before," says Duggan.

That’s just one part of the MBA. Regent research and innovation director Dhiru Soni says the entire programme there is in "a state of flux". Rather like someone asking what is the meaning of life, Regent is asking itself fundamental questions, like what is the purpose of business education, and what should an MBA graduate be able to do?

At the heart of the answer, says Soni, is the realisation that the MBA should no longer be based around curriculum knowledge but around the development of individual students. "The rapid pace of new technology penetration in all domains of business has disrupted jobs significantly and diluted the relevance of the core curriculum of our MBA," he says.

At least these schools have existing MBA programmes to build on. Spare a thought for Fulu Netswera, who found himself launching both a business school and an MBA programme during the pandemic.

Dean of the faculty of management sciences at Durban University of Technology, Netswera looked forward to welcoming dozens of students to the MBA programme when it launched in July.

Not only were enrolments down on expectations — most established business schools have had the same problem — but the intended block-release study format had to be abandoned in favour of an all-online format.

Netswera says launching a "new and unknown entity" into a disrupted, crowded market has been "nerve-racking."